Tag: package management

It’s nice to see there is hope for a better package management in Fedora…

YUM upstream will soon be considered deprecated, and we will move into a DNF/hawkey/librepo-based future. This includes PackageKit. I’m going to be building a hawkey based backend with help from the maintainer, and he is is aware of what PK does and any unusual tasks that are performance critical.

We should keep old versions of metadata on the server to stop metadata refresh explosions happening where yesterdays primary gets updated because a transaction only has todays filelists installed. This will significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth used by the metadata updates.

We should keep old versions of packages on the mirrors, to avoid the case where we depsolve fine, get 404 on the package download and then have to re-download MD, depsolve, etc. YUM apparently has issues with multiple versions of a package being present in the metadata, so we should probably only reference the latest packages in the MD (which also keeps the MD to sane size).

We should ship the per-arch solv files in the repo MD. This avoids SAT solutions like libsolv from spending 20 seconds+ per repo rebuilding .solv files from sqlite or xml metadata, and allows us to kill the dnf cron job

We should teach rpm to update it’s own SAT database, which we can do with an RPM plugin.

We want a software center, and fedora-tagger can provide the ratings/comments information. We might need an OCS server for screenshots, or can tie in screenshots with automated QA somehow.

We are going to teach koji about appstream data, so a simple extract script (to be written by me) can produce a .tar file of icons and a .xml file of translated descriptions at the end of each koji build

We are going to teach the compose tools to xmlmerge all the appstream .xml files and ship as appstream.xml

We are going to teach the compose tools to join all the tar files and ship as appstream-data.tar.gz

We are going to investigate the use of meta-desktop files to install a super-set of applications, e.g. KDE, or “Python developer” which allows for screenshots, ratings and all that stuff.